Cheap Trip: March 2008

Cheap Hotels

The concept originated with the Motel Inn of San Luis Obispo, constructed in 1925 by Arthur Heineman.
Unlike their predecessors, auto camps and tourist courts, motels quickly adopted a homogenized appearance. Typically one would find an 'I'- or 'L'- or 'U'-shaped structure that included rooms, an attached manager's office, a reception which usually takes up the space of one guest room and perhaps a small diner. Postwar motels sought more visual distinction, often featuring eye-catching neon signs which employed pop culture themes that ranged from Western imagery of cowboys and Indians to contemporary images of spaceships and atomic symbols.
The motel began in the 1920s as mom-and-pop motor courts on the outskirts of a town. They attracted the first road warriors as they crossed the United States in their new automobiles. They usually had a grouping of small cabins and their anonymity made them ideal trysting places (or the "hot trade" in industry lingo). Even the famous outlaws Bonnie and Clyde were frequent guests, using motels as hideouts. The motels' perceived lust and larceny alarmed then FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who attacked motels and auto camps in an article he penned called "Camps of Crime", which ran in the February 1940 issue of American Magazine.
Exterior of a Howard Johnson's motor lodge.Motels differed from hotels in their emphasis on largely anonymous interactions between owners and occupants, their location along highways (as opposed to urban cores), and their orientation to the outside (in contrast to hotels whose doors typically face an interior hallway). Motels almost by definition included a parking lot, while older hotels were not built with automobile parking in mind.
With the 1952 introduction of Kemmons Wilson's Holiday Inn, the 'mom and pop' motels of that era went into decline. Eventually, the emergence of the interstate highway system, along with other factors, led to a blurring of the motel and the hotel. Today, family-owned motels with as few as five rooms may still be found along older highways. The quality and standards of every independent motel differ. Sometimes, these older locations that are in poor condition are referred to as "roach motels.

Long-stay accommodation

Motels with low rates sometimes serve as housing for people who are not able to afford an apartment or have recently lost their home and need somewhere to stay until further arrangements are made.
Motels offering such accommodation have also served as a haven for fugitives of the law. In the past, the anonymity and the ability to move around easily between motels in different regions by dropping in and checking out with a simple registration process allowed fugitives to remain ahead of the law. However, several advances have reduced the capacity of motels to serve this purpose. Credit card transactions, which in the past were more easily approved and took days to report, are now approved or declined on the spot, and are instantly recorded in a database, thereby allowing law enforcement access to this information. Laws in many places now require registering guests to present a government-issued photo ID, especially when paying with cash. TV shows such as America's Most Wanted and various web sites alert the greater public to the identity of more fugitives, and many local law enforcement agencies frequently check motels when they suspect a wanted individual may be staying in their jurisdiction.

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